Introduction to "The Dark Mirror"

This is a typical appreciation that Bernard's books have received over the years:

In this book of dappling light and shadow, the constant avowal of beauty is evident; indeed, this poet-artist mixes his word pallette with exquisite care, thus creating a work of kaleidoscopic impressions of the past and present, the whole being fused in the very essence of poesia itself.

The author steps in and out of these scenes at will. One moment he is part of the cold heart of winter, huddled before his log fire in a Japanese farmhouse and aware of the nuances whispering all about; the next he is meditating on the sorrowful loveliness of the cherry blossom time, or remembered days of childhood in the depths of London's Wimbledon Park in the Twenties.

What we are witnessing here is a master craftsman at work, delighting in the ageless simplicities of life, not only along woodland paths but in the darkest recesses of the psyche. As he says:

"anxious me

always afraid after nightmares

that nature

has lost her way."

Bernard Durrant has the rare ability to see beauty in the most mundane of landscapes, in shapeless objects and ordinary people. He appears not to have lost the romanticism of his boyhood, which may not please some of today's overarching cynicism in the modern reader. I am too old to mix love's volupturous colours, he tells us; and perhaps we should pretend to take him at his word.

The fleeting portrait here of his mother, an Edwardian beauty, is an amusing little gem:

"....my mother was ominously silent on the way home to Wimbledon Park. An air of pained disbelief lurked in her fine eyes. From the open top of the London bus, the wooden slated seats damp with fog, the world looked bleak to me...."

But all ends well after this visit to a famous phrenologist, whose dire predictions on the boy's future prospects are not taken seriously; more the pity!

A solitariness permeates these pages; this lonesome spirit between the lines seems to hint of secrets in the Dark Mirror's memory, too painful to bring into the daylight, let alone to any reader's attention. His poems and prose writings rest, as they should, on the quality of the work he has produced over the years. The man himself has every right to remain an invisible identity. At a time in history when everyone wants to become a celebrity, I find it refreshing to know a soul who is content to linger, as Henry Thoreau did, where there is a tree for every mood of the heart.

Norma Woodbridge, North Fort Myers, Florida, U.S.A.

Norma Woodbridge is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University, in Philadelphia. She spent part of her youth in Cameroon, West Africa. The author of seven published works of poetry in America, she was described by Dr. Krishna Srinivas, president of International Poets Academy of America, as a writer who enriches the parnassian scene. In 1966 she gave several piano concerts, one an all-Gershwin programme to great acclaim. Now resident of Florida, she is currently working on a book which examines emotional traumas and other aspects of human suffering.